The Curse of White Roses
by Rasiaa
Summary: Something always gets in the way, but honey, I swear it won't this time. /Reincarnation.


_For Nick. Thanks for your continued support._

* * *

The first time, his hair is blond and hers is a dark, fathomless black. It's the same, all the same, but he has hazel eyes and her are brown. She's so small, but he towers over everyone else and it must be the cruelty of fate that it should ever change.

They are married in secret, and when he father finds out he disowns her. She flees her home and falls ill in the darkness of the nights, and when he finds her at the breaking of dawn two days later, it's nearly too late.

"I'm sorry- my dear…" he breathes, holding her close in the failing tower far from the loving city of Camelot and her nobles, where she used to live in splendor and in grace.

She pulls away from him and shakes her head, her curls falling from their bonds to frame her face. "I would do it all again," she says, reaching for him. "Over and over and over again because I love you and no fate in the world will ever change that. I do not regret."

It rains that night and pneumonia is an old killer, one that they have not been able to ever catch. This time is no exception. The tower is old and falling apart, but it had been their best chance.

He buries her in the finest pure white lace and fresh white roses.

…

She becomes a tightrope walker in a circus and he confesses that she scares the hell out of him, holding a parasol and dancing and flipping on the wire. She smiles. "Where is the thrill of adventure, and what is life without the rush of adrenaline?" she asks.

"A safe one," he replies, and she laughs.

"I am safe," she assures, "My master will never let me die."

Except he does.

…

Times pass again and again.

It is 1776 and they are getting closer.

This time, their roles reverse, and he is she and she is he. His hair is still the fathomless black, and hers is still the enchanting blonde, but this time, they both have blue eyes.

He cradles her face and she cries. "Choosing a side this way…"

He shakes his head and pulls away from her, grabbing his weapon from the kitchen table and the lantern from the hook by the door. "We cannot live like this, not anymore. When next we meet, we will be free. I promise," he says, and slams the door behind him. There is the sound of a horse and she watches from the window as the light fades from view.

"Come back to me," she pleads into the silence of the house, leaning on the wall and sinking to the floor.

Six weeks later and she is once again the one to bury him in white roses.

…

Their lives rotate and sometimes they meet, sometimes they don't.

Once, they meet briefly in the street after news of a murder echoes in the night.

Another time, one serves the other dinner while the other is on a date with someone else.

One time, they talk for an entire week in a bar and then it ends when marriage bonds come knocking, ready to whisk them both away.

…

But this time, this time, they are both women and they know that this is a sin, but it doesn't matter, it just doesn't even matter… not now, not ever. It's 1901, the blonde justifies, and men are useless and don't even care for either of them and as long as they're quiet, what difference does it make?

Their temperaments change the next time round. But for now, the blonde leans heavily into the brunette's kiss and hands roam freely and neither of them notice the cling of cigarette smoke and the captivating promise of coins from the gambling house below them. This is enough.

When it's over, and it always is, every night, the blonde leaves her in the middle of the night for the husband she believes she doesn't know about. Huffing as the door closes, the brunette- still smaller than the blonde this time- lights a cigarette and stares at the ceiling without thinking. Her dark eyes roam and land on her empty bed.

She flicks the ashes of the cigarette and watches without concern as the fragile fabric catches the ash and turns it to flame. Smoke rises quickly and she is nearly blinded by the light, and in the back of her mind she wonders how this will break her lover, but still cannot find the will to move.

Violent delights have violent ends, and this time is no different. The burial is a week later, and the blonde attends in a black dress and a veil of mourning. White roses line the graveyard, and for the rest of her life, it's all she thinks about.

…

It is back the way it was originally, the blond taking the form of a man and the brunette a woman. He holds her and cheats with her shamelessly on a wife that he leaves at home for the calling of the Mafia in the late 1960's. She works for the whorehouse across the street, because for all of the women's rights movements, she has not found her place among the rich.

Her beauty is outdated and intelligence has always counted for nothing, after all.

He tells her he loves her, and she asks, "If you love me, why don't you marry me?"

"Personal whores are never important, doll, so don't think you're the exception."

She wants to scream and yell and cry, but instead she nods and aborts the baby. No one knows, but she sobs in the night, and the guilt eats her alive.

He shoots her in a fit of rage one night and doesn't do anything for her body. She is forgotten, except for the single white rose.

…

"Afghanistan or Iraq?"

This time, their lives revolve entirely around one another- the detective more so than the soldier, however, that may be because he falls first and he falls hard- and they can't stop hurting each other and making excuses. They're both Englishmen in the world of technology and fantastic murder and games with useless strings of numbers and windows of blood staining "I O U." This time, something is always testing them.

One night, after their criminal is finally dead and gone, John frowns at the flower stand when he passes the white roses. Sherlock looks at him curiously but doesn't say a word, which is unusual.

On impulse, John goes back the next day and buys the bouquet, leaving them on the doorstep of a flat where he used to live. Sherlock opens the door and finds them there, taking them inside hurriedly and leaving them on the counter. They remind him unfailingly of death and he just can't stand it.

That night, he dreams of a fallen noble and a broken tightrope walker and of a war and burning beds and gunshots. Sherlock wakes up screaming, wrapped tightly in the bed sheets, unbearably alone. For the first time since he was eight, he buries his face in his hands and cries.

.

After that, memories start to return to Sherlock slowly, normally in dreams, but sometimes in the middle of the day when something is a trigger. He stops smoking and stiffens in reflex when he hears guns. People start to notice that he's changed.

"Are you okay, Sherlock?" John asks a few weeks later, when he's over for tea.

"Never better," he replies primly, staring at the ceiling with his fingers in a steeple formation under his chin. His tea has gone untouched for two hours, and he's hardly looked or spoken to John in the month it's been since the white roses triggered his memories. Because he knows that's they are- nothing else they could be. Nothing else is so vivid.

John frowns at him, but Sherlock says no more.

.

Sherlock briefly considers drugs again, but one look at Lestrade and he pushes the thought away. No amount of bliss is worth the only thing he has left.

John is married and a father-to-be, now, after all. He feels like the whore all over again, even though he knows, logically, that he's not really in that life anymore- sometimes, especially recently, everything is so, so real, he's starting to confuse them all.

So. The Work is all he has. So what if fate has pushed he and John together several times over the centuries? John doesn't remember, and probably never will, and if it's happened this many times, it will happen again in the next life.

For a second, he marvels at his new thought process before he inwardly kicks himself for thinking so romantically. Though, he muses, fate does seem to favor him as the metaphorical woman in the relationship. Only once has it ever been reversed.

.

"Mary cheated on me and the kid isn't mine," John says bluntly, a week after the child is born. Sherlock frowns. He hasn't met the child yet, has never seen it, because he's been working. "So I'm moving back in here with you," John continues, and Sherlock stands dumbly to the side to allow John and his bags into the flat.

"How do you know that?" Sherlock asks, when he's found his voice.

"The kid's black, Sherlock."

There's a moment of silence, during which John piles his things into his old bedroom upstairs and returns to find Sherlock still standing there, in the open doorway.

John frowns. "Sherlock?"

He jolts, and slams the door. John winces at the noise, but Sherlock hardly blinks, and sweeps past to enter the living room, and John follows, just like he always used to.

Sherlock throws himself onto the couch with his usual dramatic flair, and when he's settled, he says, "Very sorry to hear that."

John shrugs. "We've been fighting a lot recently anyway. This was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak." He looks around and just sort of stands there, suddenly looking like he feels very awkward about something. Sherlock isn't sure what.

"John?" he inquires, and the man jumps, pointing to the kitchen swiftly, the air of awkwardness anything but gone.

"Tea?" John asks, and Sherlock considers for moment before waving his consent. John practically trips over himself to get out of the room, and it's Sherlock's turn to frown.

John spends close to twenty minutes in the kitchen, doing who-knows-what, but Sherlock decides that he should let John do as he pleases, since he's about to be a divorced man, if his behavior is anything to go by. He stares aimlessly at the ceiling instead of pestering his renewed flatmate, feeling the dark tendrils of boredom creeping up on him. He's not had a case in a week…

A cup full of tea appears in front of his face, and he goes cross-eyed staring at it. "Tea, Sherlock," John's voice says impatiently, and so he takes the cup and sits up.

John is holding a dead stem. A stem which once bore a white rose. Sherlock winces internally.

"You kept them," John says, obviously having recognized the remnants of the bouquet in the kitchen. Stupid, Sherlock scolds himself, but it wasn't like there was anything to be done about it now. He nods curtly. A crease forms between John's eyebrows, and he twirls the stem a little, setting his tea on the coffee table. "Um, why?"

Sherlock shrugs. "Why not?" he returns, and John looks uncomfortable before stuttering out his agreement and tossing the stem to the side.

.

John goes to bed and Sherlock tries everything in his power to prevent himself from doing the same, but eventually succumbs to sleep just before three am.

Barely an hour later and he jolts up with a scream, feeling the sting of his father's hand and the horrified shrieks of his mother before he remembers that, not only was that over six hundred years ago, but also that that is not his life.

John bursts into his bedroom, gun in hand and looking like he's still half-asleep. They stare at each other for a moment, before John says tiredly, "You've never had nightmares, Sherlock," and it sounds like an accusation.

He tries to pull off a nonchalant shrug, but fails miserably when John lifts the hand with the gun to rub at his sleepy eyes. John doesn't miss his instinctive wince, and frowns in concern, suddenly looking wide awake. "Has something happened, Sherlock?" he questions gently. Sherlock hates the look of pity and false sympathy more than the gun.

He huffs and turns his back on John, pulling his sheets up over his head and listening for John's departure. Instead all he hears is a sigh and the sound of the door closing before footsteps move towards him and the bed creaks when John sits down. A gentle hand rests on his shoulder, and John urges him to turn back around. He complies with a sigh, and for a long time- could be a minute, an hour, a century- they stare at each other in silence.

John must see something in Sherlock's face, because he suddenly sounds oddly hopeful, "You remember?" he asks.

Sherlock frowns, but John leans forward and kisses him and suddenly the world is completely silent except for John.

Drugs and blades and the Work had never shut his brain off so completely as John does in this moment, so he finds himself groaning into the kiss and gripping John's hair desperately- when had they gotten there? –and John leans over him and runs his hand down his side and oh, god.

This is what he's been waiting for.

.

John's divorce goes through smoothly, and so John kisses Sherlock in the middle of the court, right in front of Mary, and even though it leaves him breathless and dizzy and almost completely useless as far as brain function goes, he still manages to feel smug about her sad, teary eyes. He had liked her well enough, and then she shot him, but she made John happy for a while so he put up with her, but now… now he wouldn't have to.

Now it was Sherlock who John turned to for everything, Sherlock who he kissed good morning and good night, it was Sherlock who he made love to and it was Sherlock who gave him everything he wanted.

So sue him if he felt a bit smug about it.

.

Things start off a bit rocky. Despite their history in their past lives, "Sherlock" and "John" had been friends and coworkers first, and adjusting to a relationship was a bit awkward. Sherlock wanted nothing more than to jump right into things, but John wanted to take things slower. Something told him that John remembered different things- different lives, even though a few of their memories coincided, a few on both sides did not. They discovered this early on, and since then, John treated the whole situation like he normally would with someone other than Sherlock. That is to say, slowly.

"Any particular reason why you're treating me like glass?" Sherlock asks later, two months after the divorce.

John jumps in his chair, his eyes swiveling to land on Sherlock, who is lying on the couch in his usual position, staring at the ceiling again. "I'm not," John denies, going back to his typing. Sherlock allows the clicks to go on for a full minute and a half before he speaks.

"Are you writing up the case with the ankle bracelet and the missing son?" he asks, and he hears John hum in response, which means yes. He rolls his eyes and huffs, "Dull. Boring, John, why are you being boring?"

The typing pauses before picking up at a faster pace, John electing to ignore Sherlock, who huffs again. "And, going back to the original subject, I know that we're both ready for sex, so why are we waiting?"

John slams a hand on the desk, groaning aloud. "God dammit, Sherlock! Let it be!"

There's a moment of silence, then John continues to type. Sherlock mutters quietly to the air, "Once, we did it on the first night of meeting each other and the relationship lasted for fifty seven years."

John stops typing. Unsurprising- it's the first time either of them has addressed the rather glaring fact that they are, for lack of a better term, soulmates. Sherlock says nothing more, and John eventually takes his normal place on the couch with the telly on, Sherlock's head in his lap and John's fingers running through the dark curls. Sherlock doesn't bother trying to stay awake, but he's jolted into partial consciousness when John carries him to bed and lies down beside him.

.

Weeks pass and neither of them brings it up again.

…

He is a bartender and he's fallen fairly hard for him. It's 1654, and the arranged marriage is just around the corner.

The man is incredible, amazing, brilliant. Dark hair, blue eyes, and it doesn't seem to matter that he's a he and not a she.

Except the feeling is not reciprocated, unrequited. But their friendship is enough.

One night it becomes too much. He kisses the bartender in the backward alleyway and he kisses back but says, "I'm married. This will never happen again."

A month passes and the bartender mentions that he's moving to Ireland. His heart stops in his chest, but the bartender doesn't notice.

He buys the man a novel and presses a flower into his favorite page. It's a goodbye gift.

Some years later, the former bartender, father of three, opens the book and feels his heart stop when a white rose flutters from one of the pages, brittle and broken.

…

"I dreamt last night," John says casually, and Sherlock hums in response, carefully rearranging his case wall to match up with the new evidence. "It was about us."

Sherlock pauses, hand hovering over the map of London, thumb tack between his index finger and thumb lowering a bit with the pull of gravity without his consent. Stubbornly, he stabs it into the wall already full of tacks and older holes, right through a piece of red ribbon connecting the entire puzzle no one but he and John could ever hope to decipher. "And how did that dream go?" he questions, his mind drifting away. The man had made a mistake with the fingerprint, he'd thought, but it was a phantom print- a hint?

"It was the seventeenth century, for starters," John says bluntly. Sherlock's heart stutters in his chest. John is acknowledging this for the very first time. "I think I fell for you first, that time," he continues, so Sherlock turns to face him, noticing how John isn't looking away from the book in his lap. "Every other time it was you who fell in love with me first. It was a new experience."

Sherlock finds himself at a loss for words, gaping at his partner. John glances up when he continues to say nothing, and something in Sherlock's posturing must spark something within, because John quirks a smile and gestures for Sherlock to come closer. Blindly, Sherlock follows the request and falls into the small space left on the chair, half of his body on top of John. "I love you, you silly git," John says fondly, pressing a kiss into Sherlock's hair.

He buries his face into John's side, feeling the older man laugh slightly as a hand runs up and down his ribcage. "How about tonight?" John whispers, his fingers teasing the hem of Sherlock's shirt. Sherlock leans up and kisses him in response.

.

Their first year anniversary passes without a hitch; it's the next week that brings the trouble.

A car accident. It's so mundane Sherlock could die. The heartbeat monitor and breathing machine he's hooked up to promise that very outcome.

He groans and shifts, cracking open his eyes. The light blinds him so they fall shut again, his head moving away from the offending brightness. It's only when the beeps suddenly escalate, the drip gets ripped from his arm, and the breathing tube falls from his nose with his frantic head movement that he realizes that he's in hospital. Nurses flood the room and he starts to suffocate, his eyes snapping open as he struggles for breath. The beeping monitor becomes frantic, and he can vaguely hear voices shouting orders.

Amongst them, as he's unhooked from non-essential machines, he can make out John's frantic calling, "Sherlock! Sherlock! What's going on, please? Please, Sherlock!"

He wants desperately to answer his lover's distressed voice, but they put something over his mouth and he's suddenly losing his vision. The last thing he hears is an order for surgery. He can feel the warmth of his blood covering his sheets from where the IV was tugged from the vein in his arm. He still can't breathe.

…

"Don't leave me," she pleads, tugging desperately on his arm. It will not be last time he goes to war.

Outside, the sound of gunfire break the tranquility of Poland's streets, and she can hear the orders being issued to kill everyone on their kill list, and capture the rest. He turns away from the door and pushes her into the cellar, locking the door above her. "I'm sorry, but I must. Stay alive, love."

The voices get louder and she dashes off into the tunnels, not looking back. Primal fear pushes her forward, but all she wants is to go back. If she's to die, she wants to die by her husband's side. The Nazis have taken so much already.

The exit is ahead, and she bursts from it, dashing through the rose garden and over the border. It is only when she's safely across the river does she look back.

The world is engulfed with flames.

…

"Sherlock?"

A warm hand brushes over his forehead. He groans in response, leaning into the touch. "Sherlock?" the voice repeats. "Sherlock, come back to me," it says, and he struggles to put a face and a name to the voice that's so familiar.

A minute passes, or maybe it's two or an hour, he doesn't know, but he opens his eyes to dimmed lighting and John's face hovering in his line of sight. The anxiety evaporates from John, and his face breaks out into a smile. "Sherlock!" he cries, pressing their lips together. He kisses back weakly, and John pulls away too soon.

He considers protesting, but he's gradually regaining awareness, and the objection dies on his tongue. There are bands around his wrists and ankles, and there's that pesky oxygen tube in his nose, the IV in his arm, and the heart monitor beeping steadily nearby. He sighs, blinking and looking drowsily around the mostly bare hospital room. "What happened?" he asks, his voice scratching unpleasantly in his throat, a clear indication of infrequent use.

John sits heavily in the chair next to his bedside, and Sherlock eyes him worriedly. Dark circles have formed under his tired eyes, and it's clear that he hasn't changed clothes in at least three days. However, the extra clothing behind him indicates that his stay has been longer than that. John looks thinner, by at least five pounds, so at least two weeks, possibly longer. His attention his diverted when John begins speaking.

"You were in a car accident," John informs him. "It hit on the side where you were sitting, so you experienced a lot of the impact. Four broken ribs, a cracked collarbone, cracked skull, and one rib punctured your right lung." Sherlock's eyes widen in alarm, suddenly realizing why his frantic movements when he first woke would have been cause for surgery. John continues, "They managed to get the bleeding under control in your head, so no brain damage that they can tell." Reassuring. "Your ribs are still healing, and your collarbone hadn't been nearly as severe as they had first assumed, so it finished healing four days ago. Your lung had started bleeding again when you woke up the first time, so it's undergone another set of stitching and draining. You'll have to take it easy," John finishes.

Sherlock takes a deep breath, partly because it's a lot to take in, and partly to prove that he still can. He runs the information through his mind, storing it away. "How long ago was that?" he asks.

John averts his eyes. A while, then. "Two months ago, you were hit, Sherlock."

.

They release him three weeks later. He has bandages around his chest, and there was some damage to his balance, so John helps him walk around a bit for the first couple of weeks following his release. He can walk on his own again just before he has the bandages removed.

There were a few stitches from superficial glass wounds that John had neglected to mention, so the scars on his body had come as an unpleasant surprise. He had shrieked and pitched a fit worthy of a five year old until Mycroft agreed to an expensive procedure that would erase any evidence of scarring.

Now, he's lying on the bed with John, half on top of him, his head tucked into the crevice of the ex-soldier's neck as John reads silently to himself. He closes his eyes, content, and John's fingers ghost through his curls. Despite himself, he presses into the touch, causing a brief chuckle from John, who continues the motions without protest or further prompts.

He frowns when he realizes that John has not turned a page in fifteen minutes, so he opens his eyes and looks up at his lover, who is staring at the book with a distant look in his eyes. "What's wrong?" he asks, and John blinks as if coming out of a daze.

He smiles at Sherlock, who raises his eyebrows, and the smile falls. His gaze returns to the books, and he says, "I was just thinking of how close I came to losing you."

Sherlock frowns and tries to sit up, but John presses him back down. He settles back into place, tense, as John drops his hand to his waist and starts to draw mindless patterns into the exposed skin of his hip. They sit in silence for another minute before Sherlock finds his voice. "You won't loose me, John," he says, but John starts shaking his head.

"I've lost you dozens of times before, Sherlock. Who says that this isn't our last chance?"

Sherlock freezes. The words come a moment later, and they're half-formed thoughts, a jumble of words and sentences that he can hardly believe are falling from his lips, "So what if it is? We die together this time, John, and wherever it is we're going, we will go together, or not at all," he swears.

John huffs a tired laugh and kisses Sherlock's temple. "The things you say, sometimes…" John trails off in favor of kissing Sherlock's mouth this time, an action that Sherlock doesn't object to in the least. "I love you," John sighs, pulling away, the book making its way onto the side table and the lamp going out.

"Love you, too," Sherlock assures, as John leans over him in the darkness and kisses him again with the promise of forever on his lips.


End file.
